Action and Contemplation: Finding Balance in Vocation

Little boys make heroes out of men of great action: the General, the Politician, the Revolutionary, the Inventor, the Explorer, the Astronaut, the Firefighter. For it seems that in childhood we have a great need to do and to try. What little boy did not at some point in his life want to go to the moon? Or fight in a war? It is not merely that we desire to mimic those who we have made into heroes, but because we want to be the hero. We want to become somebody else's hero. Even people whose temperament or personality would never permit them to actually act on those desires nevertheless seem to have them to some degree or another.

I do not even begin to question the popularity of the concept of Superman or Spiderman--normaly, socially unadjusted men who accomplish great things and win the heart of a maiden in the process. The Superman of the American pop culture is the embodiment of the introvert's daydream.

This desire to be a hero is born out of our desire to escape mortality. Mortality is, ipso facto a death sentence. So from the time we are children we long to accomplish that which will make us remembered. And often, remembrance is found more in infamy than in fame. This explains why the Superman of Krypton can quickly become the Superman of Nietzche, that is, the transformation of Marcus Aurelius to Hitler. Some little boys never pass this phase of their fixation, though others do.

The little boys who begin to mature turn their admiration to another sort, I think. The maturing lad who has discovered the world of altruism comes to admire the Poet, the Philosopher, the Novelist, and the Scientist. It is no longer the creative process that captures the mind, but the observation process. The child no longer wants to be Patton, but Plato. Contemplation becomes paramount--a life of solitude and thought is idealized. Whether it is Thomas Merton and St. John of the Cross or the Buddha and Shankara, the Thinker supplants the Soldier.

While this transition is an improvement and a maturation, I do not believe it is the mature view. I think it is merely a decrease in immaturity, for as great as the Thinker may be or as high as his Thoughts might reach, there is a sort of emptiness in the purely Contemplative, a void. For the transition from Action to Thought is an overraction, it shows an exaggerated sensibility to the errors of the former by rejecting it entirely in favor of the latter. I believe there is a balance that inheres in a person's true vocation (which I do not mean in the occupational sense but in the understanding of one's "life calling").

This balance is found in people like Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchill, Susan B. Anthony. These are people who were both Thinkers and Actors. Some were known more for their thinking (Burke) and others for their action (Churchill), but a careful study of the lives of these people indicate an intimate relationship between the two aspects of life. For I think that the union of contemplation and action requires a maturity absent the Austere Philosopher and the Bold Doer. Churchill's political philosophy is not as thorough as Locke's, and it can be quite easily assumed that Jefferson's metaphysics would not stand the test of a Wittgensteinian analysis, but Locke did not save England from the Nazis, and Wittgenstein did not grant freedom to the Americas.

If I am the kind of person whose propensity is toward action, I must make room in my life for contemplation in order that my action be tempered with wisdom and humility. If I am the kind of person whose propensity is toward contemplation, I must make the effort to turn those thoughts into action--to make them real.

My closing thought is thus: Action without thought is brute--Thought without action is empty.